I always felt Warp got a bit of a raw deal getting killed off in Salvation Run (which has numerous flaws as a story, not least the idea that half of the supervillains would willingly say “sure thing, Joker can be the leader!”). I mean, yeah, he’s a teleporter and all so he can come back easy enough, but even so – Warp is a cool character, and cool characters shouldn’t get sacrificed for a lousy climax to a miniseries most people didn’t even read. Warp’s ow-tray-zhuss French accent should be fiat armor enough to protect him in any crossover. That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it.

And really, that goes for most of the New Brotherhood of Evil – including Monsieur Mallah and the Brain, also both victims of Salvation Run and writers who don’t know awesome villains when they see them. But also Plasmus (a Nazi made entirely of acid goop, which is almost as good as Swarm, the Marvel Universe’s Nazi made out of bees) and Phobia (a fear inducing villainess with awesome costume). Those are awesome characters.

And then there is Houngan, a character who is really kind of dumb, and who escapes criticism mostly because the vast majority of his appearances have been drawn by George Perez. If ninety percent of Carcharo’s appearances were drawn by George Perez, he would be a totally awesome villain, rather than the worst of all the DC shark-themed villains. But Perez aside, sometimes you just have to recognize when a shitty character is shitty, even if they have a pretty nifty costume. (And Houngan’s, while a bit dated at this point and in need of a small bit of revamping, is pretty nifty.)

And Houngan is shitty, because his origin doesn’t exactly work. He’s a computer scientist, right? And he goes back to Haiti and he learns voodoo. Fine and good. Computers and voodoo, mix of science and magic – this could be a pretty good villain concept! And then what does he do?

He makes a voodoo doll, but it’s a computer voodoo doll. That’s it. That is Houngan’s entire fucking shtick.

Voodoo is this massive goddamn religion, right? With tons of nifty occult trappings: slave-zombies, evil spirits, secret societies, ancestral protection… hell, voodoo’s entire thing is that it is the religion that takes whatever it likes from every other religion. It is like open-source religion (which, and I know Houngan was created in the early 80s before open-source was really a thing, but whatever – the next time someone uses Houngan, they should understand how a computer scientist would think about open-source as applied to religion). All of this could be combined to make a pretty damn awesome character. (In fact, it did. And then they decided for some stupid reason he should be Sorcerer Supreme. Sorry, “Houngan Supreme.” Yeah, still bitter about that.)

But all Houngan does is one thing. He does a voodoo doll. Which he says is better because it’s done with computers, but whatever – it works the same as a regular old voodoo doll. All Houngan’s voodoo doll does that other voodoo dolls don’t is spark electricity every so often. Plus, given that Houngan needs a sample of skin or hair or whatever for his supposedly superior voodoo doll, every time he actually wants to use his voodoo doll, it’s the same scenario: the hero is unconscious or tied up or whatever, so he has time to stroll over and get a skin sample and put it in his voodoo doll, and then he uses the voodoo doll to hurt the hero.

So basically Houngan is the supervillain who’s really only threatening once you’ve already lost.

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As much as I want to keep John Constantine and the Teen Titans as far from each other as possible, reading the idea of “open source religion” made me think he should be repurposed as a villain in Hellblazer, written by Warren Ellis.

But as I said, Constantine and the Teen Titans have to be kept as separate as possible.

Mentioning Phobia reminds me of my favorite moment with Phobia, which was actually written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez. But not in Titans; it’s in ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’.

It’s in the big hero vs. villain rumble in issue nine, where the villains decide to team up and take over a few Earths for themselves. Phobia is using her fear-inducing powers to keep the locals in line, when she goes up against Platinum of the Metal Men. One of the other villains shouts, “It’s no good! Your fear-inducing powers won’t work on her! She’s a robot–she has no emotions!”

And Platinum responds with, “That’s right! I am a robot–and a very angry one!”

To quote Bender: “I don’t have emotions. And sometimes that makes me very sad.”

What’s better than a computerized voodoo doll? A robot voodoo doll. At least then it can go collect the tissue samples on its own.

But yeah, cyber-voodoo could work for a supervillain. Cyber zombies, digital Loa, preloaded incantations on an iPod.

You can keep or toss the “look at me, I’m a super” costume depending on how you want to go, but it should really get a re-design. Something more menacing, and doesn’t say “why won’t the Village People return my calls?”

The funny part is, sympathetic image magic seems to have much more roots in medieval European tradition than in voudou (at least voudou as described by Wade Davis in The Serpent and the Rainbow— a good book, BTW; dunno about the movie).

This guy could work if they pushed the shtick farther, as dirge93 above suggested. Make him a variant on Abra Kadabra: a guy who performs what’s essentially magic via technological means. And make him bug-fuck crazy. And then put him in a one-hero city and let him loose. It could work. He could be scary as shit. “Technological Voodoo” could be powerfully creepy.

I mean, this guy has a ton of potential, yeah. And especially in a modern technical world that still has a spiritualist fetish, he could definitely work.

Maybe expand the definition of “skin sample” to “ip address” or something along those lines. Maybe he has to hack your computer, but suddenly the virus he sends through your email has very real consequences to you personally. I could see this guy being an arch-nemesis to any number of tech-savvy heroes, just because he gets to claim “Magic!” and cheat, cheat, cheat.

Well, maybe someone will pick up on this and do him right. :-p We’re allowed to dream.

Too bad he looks like has bad-ass supervillain weapons are a lighter and a bottle of perfume. Is he a computer voodoo small-time pyro? At least use a can of Aquanet. Or get extra villainous points and use a can of Axe. That would be EVIL.

I’m a bit foggy on what his motivation as a villain even is – his backstory explains that he spent 4 years doing comp sci, then two years doing a graduate degree learning voodoo from people who could cure incurable diseases (which clearly explains how he’s able to create robotic voodoo dolls) and so he uses his voodoo for evil because…

Also that smoking thing in his hand is a combination incense/touch screen stylus. Which is almost as odd a combination of things that don’t need combining as the computoo doll.

Houngan would keep the hair samples he took from the Titans, so after a while he finally had a set of dolls he could use without having to wait for his team mates to do all the heavy lifting.

But yeah… He was awfully narrow in his focus. All the Titans would have to do to defeat him is let Starfire shoot him in the face while he was busy torturing Changeling.

He’s also one of the many DC characters who would be much more threatening if he had the sense to wear some kind of body armor. Considering that he sometimes could only affect, like, half the Titans during the actual fight, you’d think he would want to be ready in case Cyborg zapped him or Nightwing nailed him in the head with a batarang.

I mean… For crying out loud, Changeling defeated him one time just by turning into a hippo and landing on top of him. What’s a little sympathetic magic torture supposed to do for you then?

But one thing that really struck me about these Who’s Who pages then and now? A character as wafer-thin as Houngan gets George Perez to create not just an impressive four-color pose, but the composition and actual narrative of the background, everything down to the actual font is just…terrific. Compare and contrast to someone like, oh, Knodar, who admittedly is in the running for worst-looking-costume-weapon-haircut-trifecta (and a font just shy of “The Gang” in terms of phoning-it-in), but a casual glance doesn’t invoke curiosity beyond “Hey, is that a spatula?” I was always jealous of the Titans’ ensemble for the Perez treatments they got in WW.

Yeah, that made me blink. Doubly so, because I hadn’t read Salvation Run and I had no idea they were dead and so I can’t enjoy making fun of Houngan, because my OTP is dead. I’m not sure why DC doesn’t want to get more of a run out of characters like Monsieur Mallah and the Malicious Brain. It’s like they’re ashamed of them or something, like they think they represent what people hate about comic books. Has there ever been a negative reaction to them? It seems the most natural thing in the world to me to write a 4-part Vertigo mini-series about Mallah and the Brain going through a bad relationship patch while hiding out in Cuba — not use them to pad the body count in fucking Salvation Run.